Thursday, August 19, 2010

Gnocchi with Kale

A funny thing happened while I was making dinner last night. Well, not exactly funny. More like hilariously tragic.

I saw the "recipe" in a magazine. It's simple, really. Boil some gnocchi. Warm up a pan with some olive oil, wilt the kale, add some salt, pepper and lemon zest. Add the cooked gnocchi and voila.

I was doing great until pepper.

I have one of the those pepper grinders from the store with the peppercorns in jar with a plastic grinder screwed on the top. The plastic grinder kept jamming and my response was to just turn the grinder harder.

Wrong choice.

The grinder top came flying off and the entire contents of the jar spilled into my pot of wilted kale. The jar was full, by the way.

I tried to fish out the kale, but I still ended up with a lot of whole peppercorns in the final dish. Oh well, not worst mishap in the kitchen and probably won't be the last.

It would have been a great dish minus all the pepper. At least it looks pretty!

What's your worst cooking mishap? Mine is probably the time I made a chicken and rice casserole for my friends when I was first learning to cook. I forgot to cover the dish while it baked and I ended up serving them rice pellets. Not good.

My mom loved to tell the story about when she was a newlywed, and she and her also newlywed friend made their first Thanksgiving dinner for their husbands. They stuffed as much stuffing into the turkey as they possibly could and trussed it. The turkey exploded in the oven! Mom said they were laughing their heads off as they scraped pieces of turkey off of the oven walls. :)